A quick update to say that a new game is on the Apple iOS AppStore.
Kyle Comet is a young space hero that I once wrote a story about and self published. You can find it on Amazon here. (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-Planet-X-Mark-Wilcox/dp/1326413090)

I always wanted to create a series of games featuring a young space cadet type hero.

The premise of the game is pretty straight forward; shoot, jump and collect the goodies. I guess it’s an endless runner in that there is no structure to the game other than throwing obstacles down in front of you as you run.

This is deliberate. Akari took a lot of work in developing the level structures and writing the tools to craft all of that. I wanted a break from that style of development.

Jetpack Joyride provided a little inspiration for Kyle. It’s a game I’d played and enjoyed for some time. Even down to the cute and cartoony visuals. But my visual style is more of a pixel art style.

With The Toxic Laboratory I wanted every element to be fun.

The jump > shoot dynamic was something I’d used before and enjoyed. It allows for the game being operated with a single tap to the screen. As you tap the character jumps and shoots simultaneously. The first tap is a tiny jump but if you follow it up quickly with a second tap the character effectively takes off.

Having mastered that dynamic I drew a jetpack onto the character’s back and added smoke puffs to help illustrate the action.

Once Kyle’s character is off the ground you can ‘fly him’ for quite a stretch. Which is pretty cool as there’s plenty of floating goodies to collect.

A follow up to The Toxic Laboratory is in development just now; Kyle Comet and the Lost Moon. The Lost Moon adds platforms and more of a platformer mentality to the action.

It’s always easier to make decisions when you’re armed with data.
This morning we pulled down some stats from Apple’s reporting site to pore over the numbers.
(We don’t currently publish to Google Play, though that will come soon)

To Charge or Not to Charge

We released an arcade game (Chaos Grid) to the App Store two weeks ago and initially offered it for free.
In a short space of time we’d had just over 800 installs. 95% of those came from Japan.

It’s easy to assume that this is an indication that the game would be successful if we charged for it.
So we did and opted for the lowest tier of pricing – 99p.

7 days later and we’ve had an additional 12 installs.
Less Apple’s cut that comes in at $8.06 (£6.40)

Our assumption was wrong.
There’s work to be done before we can consider charging for the game.

There are other ways to monetise the game.
In-app Purchasing and advertising being the obvious choices. But we reject these as they aren’t true to our ‘promise’ to the customer.

We’re doing this to ‘relive the thrills of the video game arcade’.
It’s our ‘Why?’, if you like.

So we gave it about 4 seconds worth of thought and switched it back to free of charge.
Overnight the installs are back into double figures.

I guess it’s far better to have the game installed on numerous iPhones and iPads than sat there on the app store gathering dust.
A number of things happen when the game is installed:

It gets played

Our brand is all over the game’s splash screen

It (potentially) gets talked about and shared

But there was something else that occurred to us; the Japanese market was up for these games.
When we uploaded the game to the store we selected to have it available in every territory but we have no control over the exposure in each territory. So that came as a pleasant surprise.

Localisation and Culture

The screenshots that we provided for the game’s entry on the app store contain text. English text (above).
Words such as ‘RETRO ACTION’ and ‘ARCADE THRILLS’.
I’d guess that these ‘calls to action’ are wasted on the Japanese audience. They are probably far more interested in the screenshots than any blurb we wrap around it.
iTunes Connect (the developer’s gateway to the app store) offers the ability to provide localised content. We could go to the trouble of translating any words into multiple languages. But is it worth it? Would those words significantly influence the viewer to become a buyer?
I doubt it.

Far better to offer something more culturally relevant.
In the west we appear to use the screenshot as the key persuader in the buying process for an unknown title.
It’s a lot like picking up an X-Box game in the store and immediately flipping it over to see a screenshot of the game on the back cover.
But in Japan consumers warm to specific imagery. Anime style imagery. It’s relevant to them and makes the game feel less ‘alien’. The Japanese are proud of their culture and appear to warm to any attempts to embrace it.

Like this:

Here’s a handy little tip for anyone wanting to load files via AJAX in their PhoneGap apps that run on iOS courtesy of PhoneGap.

Our first attempts at creating games with PhoneGap were satisfactory but not brilliant. The frame rates were awful though the music and sound effects seemed to work fine. So we did a little digging and found that by default PhoneGap will use UIWebView, the default web view, on iOS.

You can change this to use the far more advanced and polished WKWebView (Web Kit Web View) which makes great use of such things as requestAnimationFrame. Something that is hopefully familiar to HTML5 game developers.
With WKWebView you also get to run against the superior JavaScript Nitro Engine which will massively increase the performance of your games.

We use AJAX (XMLHttpRequest) to load our audio. To date it’s worked a treat. The reason we use it is because it’s a neat way to asynchronously load and capture the onload event and act upon it as we configure each audio file (volume, for example).

Like this:

Well it’s been a long, long time since we updated our blog. So it’s a real thrill to be able to announce that we’ve been working hard on making some new arcade games. But these games are a little different; they’re built using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 (as usual) but are also wrapped up and served to the iOS AppStore.

We’re currently using PhoneGap to do the bundling and it appears to be working just fine. There are issues with choppy performance but there’s a wealth of information out there to address this. Something for a later blog post.

So what’s Chaos Grid all about?

Well, it’s an homage to the earliest shooting games from the video game arcades of yesteryear. We took our love of Defender, Robotron, Galaxians and the 8-bit classic Gridrunner and built a game around their mechanics.

The screens above are the ones we use on the iOS AppStore and they pretty accurately depict the action. Though later levels become pretty frenetic!

If you’re a fan of the old school shooting genre and love those old beeps, whirrs, and electronic wind-up sounds then we’re pretty sure you’ll love the game.